Because we are a very small team, I’ve always been good with “use whatever coding style you want!” I try to adapt to the conventions used in other people’s projects. But lately, I just want to go all-in on mandating real tabs. I’m getting too old to deal with tabs-as-spaces.

Simon Woods

Oh this feels like the kind of thing that could be helpful even to contributors. Like if it was stated on GitHub, even if it was just to let people know "this is the preferred style" when submitting a PR. Honestly I wouldn't even be bothered if it was mandated there, although I assume people have feelings about that due to the nature of voluntary work on open source projects.

Jerome (He/Him)

@manton were a small team too and often we just divide and conquer our own parts of the code base to avoid fighting over tabs vs spaces.

When we do collide, I just reindent the entire script LOL

Jim Mitchell

Uh oh… I see Micro.blog controversy on the horizon. Team tab here, so I’ve got your back. 🤣

Manton Reece

@jeromechoo Haha. Yes, I'm tempted to do that often but it really wrecks the version history.

Kirk Strauser

I had never known that you were a monster. #GiveMeSpace

Sven Dahlstrand

Are you sure you don't want to go with spaces? 😉 Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs.

Manton Reece

@sod No amount of money would make me change my mind. 🙂

Fabio Russo

@sod oh fruck, correlation or causation?? Let's go with statisticsssssssss 😁

Jason Becker

it is my firm belief that every project should have a formatter that runs in CI at a minimum, and even better as a pre-commit hook. In languages like Elixir where you can just do mix format very fast on save at all times, I don't care or think about style. It's not a choice thing, this is just how it's done. It's great.

💬 John Philpin

@sod it also looks like with experience spaces fall away .. which says something?

patrick t.

whenever I see this surfacing into an online debate I'm reminded of the Silicon Valley episode where it ends a seemingly perfect romantic relationship. 😁

Sven Dahlstrand

@JohnPhilpin 🤔 Is that reflected in the raw data? From the article, it seems like salary differences diminish somewhat around 11–15 years of experience. However, that doesn't mean people start preferring spaces less as they gain experience, right?

And just for the record, for anyone following this thread: I don’t have a preference when it comes to spaces vs. tabs. 😊 I just use whatever the project I’m contributing to uses. When I start new projects on my own and actively think about indentation (which I rarely do), I choose whatever is most common in the language I’m coding in. (For example, spaces for Ruby and JavaScript, and tabs for C and Go.)

Vincent

Uh oh... that feels aimed at me 😬

Leon Mika

You may like the way Go does it. The community has a pretty strict formatting convention, to the degree that most Go code editors will auto-format a file on save. It took a while for me to adjust, but now I think it's great: I can just rely on the formatter when writing new code. And yes, they've adopted tabs over spaces.

Manton Reece

@vincent I promise not aimed at you! It’s more aimed at everyone. 🙂

Vincent

Haha, just pulling your leg because I exactly know I am a spaces guy without even using the spacebar (by pressing tab) 😂

💬 John Philpin

@sod

Not sure about the ‘raw’ data .. just looking at the graph …

As you say, salaries paid to both ‘spaces’ and ‘both’ so slow down at the 11 to 15 year mark, whereas the ‘tab’ curve just keeps going.

My inference is that with experience the only way to keep your salary increasing at the same rate is sticking with Tabs - anything else and it starts to drop off.

Conclusion - the people that pay the bills recognize that ‘Tabs’ is the way to go and reward accordingly.

I also freely accept that the data is almost certainly not connected.

#JustTryingToStartAConspiracyTheoryHere! 😆

Sven Dahlstrand

@JohnPhilpin Love this take! 🥰

Jonathan Hays

Trying to start a flame war, I see!

matt penny

if I didn't like micro.blog so much I would unsubscribe immediately!! 😃

Manton Reece

@mattypenny Haha.

Manton Reece @manton
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